Your Bubble is Bigger Than My Bubble

President Bush lives in a bubble. That is the breathless conclusion of Newsweek reporters Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe. He doesn’t answer the calls of congressmen and his humor, rather than being inclusive and team building, like Ronald Reagan’s, is often intended to belittle a subordinate,

intended, however so subtly, to put the listener on the defensive. It is a towel-snap that invites a retort. How many people dare to snap back at a president?

Of course media analyst Brent Bozell is outraged. What Thomas and Wolffe are really upset about is that President Bush doesn’t call them. The media really doesn’t care about policy (except that it should be more “moderate”), it cares about access.

But Bruce Bartlett agrees with Newsweek. The president doesn’t like day-to-day politicking, meeting with members of Congress, or getting information from outside official channels. “The result is Mr. Bush appears to live in a sort of fantasy world utterly divorced from reality.”

The critics fail to appreciate that the leader of any organization must operate in a bubble in which most information is blocked out. Otherwise he wouldn’t get anything done. Every enterprise operates on faith in the future, and a willingness to ignore bad news and discouraging reverses. The key is to have the information to know when to take decisive action: to launch the right new product at the right time or to abort a failed initiative before it engulfs the enterprise in disaster. In the Iraq War, of course, the president would have gone mad if he had made it a point to be connected to the daily ups and downs of political sentiment.

On the two important national issues presented to him during his term in office, President Bush has made the right decision, bubble or no bubble.

President Bush’s war on terror operates within the simple grand strategic situation of the United States. It must not let the oil in the Middle East fall into the hands of one power. That is why the Iraq adventure makes complete strategic sense. It stopped Saddam’s predatory adventurism and it blocks Iran’s future predatory expansion westwards.

President Bush’s economic policy of tax rate cuts may well have prevented an economic meltdown. We cannot be sure of that, of course, because the tech crash did not develop into a full scale depression. Job One for an American president is to keep the economy on track.

People who do not understand these two points, the necessity to keep the Middle East divided and the necessity to keep the US economy on track, are the ones who are really living in a bubble.

But so far, President Bush has passed the test.